King Kong Continues To Be A Giant Gorilla

James Whitbrook

Ladies and gentlemen, I have shocking, shocking news for you: We’ve just got our first official look at King Kong in Skull Island, and yes, we can confirm he looks like a giant gorilla. Still.

Entertainment Weekly has revealed the “first look” at Skull Island‘s Kong, who will at some point in his cinematic career fight Godzilla. Unsurprisingly, he looks similar to his appearance at Universal Orlando’s Skull Island: Reign of Kong ride, because hey: They’re both giant gorillas.

It’s honestly kind of amazing — impressive, even — that Legendary has been able to reveal Kong twice, and both times have people marvel that yes, Kong is still a giant gorilla. As if we should almost be surprised by the decision to keep the most iconic simian in movie history basically looking like he has for decades. He’s King Kong! Don’t mess with what works, I guess.

But hey, if you’d like some actually very interesting insight into Skull Island‘s approach to re-iterating on the classic design of… a gorilla, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts actually has a lot of intriguing things to say about the moment in the movie we see this image of Kong over at the link below:

That sequence comes from a point in the movie where you’re not quite sure who Kong is, what his purpose is, how people should be perceiving him. Through the folly of man, where our initial instinct is to attack anything that is not a known quantity, both sides jump the gun, Kong and the humans, and it kicks off a relatively messy engagement. At first, of course you’re going to perceive something like that as a terrible threat and monster — the physicality of him alone.

A huge part of the movie was designing him and creating the creature so that when you did see him it sort of short circuited your brain and was divisive to people, where certain people immediately say ‘That’s a threat,’ certain people immediately say, ‘That’s a God,’ certain people immediately say, ‘That’s a saviour.’ Visually and instantly, what happens when you see this thing towering over you and what is your sort of emotional and intellectual response?

That’s worth checking out a lot more than a picture of a big gorilla, frankly.